This week has been a busy week for integrated infrastructure solutions. Of course, this isn’t a complete surprise around here—we have been preaching the gospel of simplified infrastructure and integrated solution stacks for some time; however, it is gratifying to see the concept continue to evolve and gain customer traction.

One of the developments we are particularly pleased with is the announcement today from EMC regarding their EMC VSPEX program. Cisco and EMC have a long history of partnering together for the benefit of our mutual customers, from storage solutions to the original Vblock to VSPEX. For those of you who missed the announcement, VSPEX is a reference design program to help guide customers as they build out their next generation of infrastructure. With our own success with the Cisco Validated Design program, we know this is an effective tool for customers as they look for trusted resources to guide infrastructure investment decisions.

We are a big fan of giving customers choice and giving them options and letting them decide on a path that best suits their needs. EMC’s VSPEX program is another great example of this. Its complimentary to our existing offerings in this space, so VSPEX gives customers yet another option and may appeal to customers that did not see the existing options as a good fit or might not have otherwise considered this approach.

Today, there is lots of buzz around the big news from Cisco and our ecosystem partners with the launch of next generation VXI validated solutions. If you missed our launch event, you can still get all the details online via our community.

Pretty cool but, why is virtualization important for government agencies?

cost control, more than ever government agencies are focused on strategies to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs

flexibilty, allow government workers ability to work in different workplaces, from city hall to public works, with choices of different combinations of virtual desktops, voice, and video devices including latest smartphones, tablets, and Cisco Virtualization Experience Clients (VXC)

security, better security and control of information in the data center rather than distributed endpoints and with the “bring your own device” (BYOD) to work phenomenon, security is more critical than ever

Microsoft TechEd 2011 was a great opportunity to talk to customers about Cisco UCS and Microsoft applications. We had so many attendees come by the booth and ask questions about UCS that we meet out target goal of customer engagments within the first two days. I was surprised how many people did not realize the depth of the platform or the integration points we provide from both an application and consolidation standpoint.

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